Pages

Thursday, July 27, 2017

Language of Confusion: Feeling Fruity, Part II

Now for citrus fruit. Except orange. Because it’s the color.
Or really, the color is because of the fruit. Go look it up.

Lemon

Lemon showed up in the fifteenth century as…lymon. Wait, isn’t that the flavor of Sprite? No, wait. That’s limon. Which is the Old French word where lymon comes from. It came to us from the Arabic laimun and Persian limun
via either Provençal (a
Southern French language) or Italian. And before that, it might even be
Malaysian! What a long way for a word to go!

Lime

Lime showed up in the seventeenth century,
but that’s where things get murky. The Spanish lima or Portuguese limão
probably gave us the word, and they probably got it from the Arabic lima, which meant citrus fruit and is
from the Persian word limun, which
I’m sure you find familiar. But it

’s another one of those that we can’t be sure of. It’s obviously related in some way, but we can’t pin down the evolution of it.

Grapefruit

Grapefruit always bugged me, because come on. It has nothing
to do with grapes. It showed up as a word in 1814, just over two hundred years ago. The fruit was known before that, but apparently
it wasn’t eaten much until the nineteenth century, and I guess that’s why
people didn’t give it a name before then. Although why grape and fruit I have no idea. It’s
thought to have been called that either because of the taste or because it grows
in bunches. It obviously doesn’t grow in clumps as numerous as grapes, but
taste? In what world do grapes and grapefruit taste alike?

Tangerine

Tangerine showed up pretty recently, in 1842.
It was originally tangerine orange, an orange from Tangier in Morocco. No big reveal here! It

’s just named after a place that shipped it out.

Clementine

Clementine is the most recent of them all, having shown up
in 1926,
from the French clementine, which
showed up in 1902. The reason it’s a clementine? It was named after a guy named Clement, who discovered it in his garden. He was actually a priest who ran an orphanage in Algeria and the fruit apparently appeared accidentally, so I guess he just happened to run across it.

That’s it for the citrus fruits. I mean, there’s a lot more
in existence, but I’m not going into all of them. Maybe when I get really hard
up for material.